By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

Nearly 50 million children have been uprooted from their homes around the world, and 28 million of those are refugees fleeing violence and conflict – and “that is a conservative estimate,” according to a UNICEF report published Tuesday.
The total number of child refugees doubled between 2005 and 2015, the report says, and children now comprise half of all refugees despite accounting for less than a third of the global population.
The report, Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children, presents “for the first time, comprehensive, global data about these children,” UNICEF writes.
A stunning 100,000 child refugees are traveling without their parents or families.

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Posted on September 9, 2016

By Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

For years, Democratic elected officials in Washington have been wary of going after Wall Street excesses too hard, lest the deep-pocketed financial industry throw all its resources to Republicans.
This has been especially true of one of the most notorious targets for financial reform: the favorable tax treatment of the outsized compensation earned by partners in private equity firms.
Democrats have long spoken out against this so-called “carried-interest loophole,” yet have often not pushed as hard as they could to change the law, which saves some of the very wealthiest people in finance billions of dollars in taxes each year.
All of this explains why the scenario presented by the 2016 election is so surreal. The Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, has vowed to close the loophole, saying it’s unfair that the highly compensated money managers who benefit from it “pay lower tax rates than nurses or . . . truckers.”
Clinton recently went even further than President Obama on the issue, saying she would close the loophole through executive action if Congress continued to resist a legislative fix, a step that Obama has shied away from taking.

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Posted on September 8, 2016

By Steve Balkin

Criminal violence seems to be falling in America long term, even in Chicago. But it is recently on the increase in Chicago and other places. Five strands of thought seem to permeate thinking about reducing this spike in criminal violence: (1) increase get-tough criminal justice system intervention, such as more police and longer prison sentences; (2) interrupt the “cradle to prison” pipeline by improving schools and implementing restorative justice programs; (3) gun restriction and control; (4) eliminate the racial bias of police, and; (5) bring more good jobs to lower income areas.
Often, policy-makers and activists focus on just one of the above as the solution towards reducing crime in general and for solving the problem of violent crime in particular.
There is a sixth way which I consider more broad-based and integrative, which is to drastically reconfigure the policy handles in the underlying frameworks in which criminal activity takes place: the legal basis for what activities are criminal and what are not; how police are trained; changing the mix of the law enforcement activity between civilians and police; how our education system works, and; a basic minimum income policy.
This reconfiguration deals with aspects of our crime control environment that need more emphasis. Most of these strategies are not expensive and the costs can be offset by increases in human capital or reduced costs in some other parts of the fiscal system (e.g., reduced prison and health care costs.) Many can be implemented at the municipal level. Some, like Nos. 1, 6 and 10 below, require help from the federal government.

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Posted on September 7, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation told a federal court Monday that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud.
EFF is supporting Microsoft in its lawsuit challenging portions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allow the Department of Justice to serve a warrant on the company to get access to customers’ e-mails and other information stored on remote servers – without telling users their data is being searched or seized.

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Posted on September 6, 2016

By Annelise Orleck/The Conversation

When it comes to their wages, McDonald’s workers around the world are not “Loving It” – and they haven’t been shy about expressing their discontent over the past four years.
But this Labor Day, America’s fast food workers can celebrate victories that have improved wages for some of them. And they can applaud a global labor movement of low-wage workers that they helped spark and continue to inspire.

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Posted on September 5, 2016

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Colin Kaepernick is a role model whether you like it or not. Many view Kaepernick’s choice of protest as disrespecting the flag, our armed forces and America itself, but the vitriol toward the football player represents the fears that children may grasp the power of civil disobedience. Students who idolize athletes like Kaepernick may also mimic him at school and sit during the pledge of allegiance in protest.
Children in our broken U.S. school system have many reasons to take a seat

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Posted on September 5, 2016

By Paul Hansen/Illinois Coin Laundry Association

The Illinois Coin Laundry Association (ILCLA) is strongly opposed to Mayor Emanuel’s plan to tax residents’ water, including those who use laundromats, at a rate of 29.5%.
The association believes that the plan is immoral because its highly regressive nature means that low-income residents will be disparately affected.

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Posted on September 2, 2016

By Michael Winship/Common Dreams

Cash and carry has become nothing more than standard operating procedure in politics and government, and it’s wrecking the republic. The whole system is rotten to the core, corrupted by big business and special interests from the seventh son to the seventh son.
Or daughter, as we learned these past few days when the news introduced us to Heather Bresch, CEO of a drug company called Mylan and daughter of Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III, who’s also the former governor of West Virginia.
Mylan manufactures and sells EpiPen, the emergency delivery system for an allergy drug, epinephrine, that can make the difference between life and sudden death. The cost for a two-pack of the devices has soared nearly 550 percent to $608.61. That’s a price far beyond the means of most families with kids threatened by possibly fatal allergic reactions.
At the same time, Bresch has seen her own compensation increase a whopping 671 percent, from $2,453,456 in 2007 (the year that Mylan bought EpiPen) to $18,931,068 in 2015.

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Posted on September 1, 2016